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← 🗺️ Geography · usually met in Std 5-10

Maps and how to read them

A map is a flat drawing of a curved world, so every map is wrong in some way. Knowing which way is the skill.

Latitude runs east-west and measures distance north or south of the equator; longitude runs north-south and measures east or west of the prime meridian. Together they locate any point exactly. Scale tells you how distance on the paper relates to distance on the ground, and the key explains the symbols. Contour lines join points of equal height, and lines close together mean a steep slope.

A globe is accurate; a flat map cannot be. Every projection distorts something — area, shape, distance or direction — and the familiar Mercator projection preserves direction for navigation while making countries near the poles look enormous compared with countries near the equator. That is why Greenland looks the size of Africa on a classroom wall and is in fact about a fourteenth of it.

Worth knowing

  • India's standard time is set from a longitude near Mirzapur, which is why the whole country runs on one clock.
  • GPS gives latitude and longitude directly, and a phone compass still needs calibrating against local magnetic variation.
  • On most maps north is up, but there is no physical reason for it — it is a convention.

Want to see it moving? Search YouTube for “Maps and how to read them” ↗ — we send you to the search rather than to one video, because a link to one video eventually rots.

See also

🗺️ The geography of India🌍 Inside the Earth🪐 Space exploration

🧭 Do not take our word for it

This entry was written for Star Student in our own words — it is a summary, not a source. Here is where the people who actually hold these facts keep them. Go and check.

Your own textbook ↗Balbharati publishes the textbooks free to read online. Your chapter is the thing to check first — an encyclopedia is a summary, and the syllabus is the syllabus. India Meteorological Department ↗The monsoon, rainfall and cyclone warnings, from the department that issues them.

Last gone through: 1 October 2026 · How these entries are written

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